Dead Saints Chronicles

The German electronic musician explores deep, fluid percussive grooves in the same vein as his work with the late drummer Jaki Liebezeit.

For many years, Burnt Friedman’s music concerned itself primarily with the play of surfaces. He made hyperreal jazz, postmodernist noir, simulacral dub. He called his label Nonplace, a nod to capitalism’s dead zones; one early album, Leisure Zones, was a 77-minute soundscape that resembled the dull hum of a nearby freeway. But somewhere around the turn of the millennium, once the German electronic musician met Can drummer and all-around polyrhythmic powerhouse Jaki Liebezeit, groove assumed a central place in his music. Friedman (real name Bernd Friedmann) and Liebezeit recorded five albums together between 2002 and 2013, and the thread running through them all is rhythm—twisting and turning, tactile as a knotted rope, boasting time signatures at once impossible to parse and easy to sink into.

Liebezeit died earlier this year at the age of 78, but his presence looms large over Friedman’s new mini-album, which brims with bubbling, percussive grooves. Despite the variety of instruments assembled here—serrated synths, stubby electric bass, and guitar and reeds played, respectively, by two long-time collaborators, Joseph Suchy and Hayden Chisholm—it is, at heart, a drummer’s record. Steel pans, bells, shakers, and deep, resonant toms yield an opulent spread of timbres and textures, and everything feels suspended in a state of permanent flux. In fact, there are few held tones at all.

Instead, the music is constructed in pointillistic fashion, from a rippling array of thumps and thwacks and pinpricks of tone. Friedman has long been interested in blurring the line between human hands and computer brains—“I’m surprised that it seems crucial for many people whether tracks on Con Ritmo or Just Landed were played or programmed,” he told The Wire in 2000—and Dead Saints Chronicles’ rhythms could easily be mistaken for the work of a crack drummer. Their fluid syncopations, shifting accents, and deep-in-the-pocket grooves are far more suggestive of muscle memory than MIDI clocks.

Several tracks utilize the kinds of time signatures that are rarely heard in grid-based electronic music. “Acroagnosis” lopes along in a convoluted 9/8 shuffle, its bells and shakers rolling like an overturned bucket of ball bearings on the deck of a small boat. “Grace,” whose ostinato bass-and-drums pulse recalls Australian improvisers the Necks’ horizontal sprawl, rides a pulse that’s difficult to parse: Eighth-note cymbal taps feel soothingly steady, but a nervous kick drum wanders all over the place, tripping up efforts to count out the beat. Even a nominally 4/4 track like “Near Life” steers clear of dance music’s straight-ahead pulse, favoring high-stepping upbeats, hiccupping accents, and glancing chords that seem barely to touch the ground. And in “Wentletrap,” a steady drip of triplets played out across synths and cymbal hits perpetually threatens to turn the groove inside out. (If you squint toward the end, when the synths turn thick and squelchy, it almost resembles Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” but rearranged in beads of amber.)

Friedman seems to be in a period of looking back right now. After 2014’s melancholy Cease to Matter, the project went quiet for more than two years, and when he returned, with The Pestle, he sequenced the archival collection like a trip back in time, beginning with tracks from 2011 and 2010 and ending up deep in the early 1990s. Dead Saints Chronicles similarly draws from previously unreleased tracks, though these are more recent, dating from between 2007 and 2016. The title is borrowed from a book about near-death experiences, in which part of the author’s research entailed sifting through thousands of hours’ worth of subjects’ recorded accounts. The press text relates that Herculean archival effort with Friedman’s own listen back through his archive of DATs, but it’s hard not to also read the title as a tribute to his own late colleague, the drummer whose name miraculously translated as “love time.” Dead Saints Chronicles is a record where rhythm reigns supreme, where even the faintest and smallest element finds its foothold in a vast and overarching constellation, where no sound is not connected to each and every other sound. It’s a record not so much about timekeeping as it is infinity.